Tokenism the Role and Experiences of Minority Teachers in Predominantly White Schools

Tokenism: The Role and Experiences of Minority Teachers in Predominantly White Schools

The Problem and Its Setting

Anticipated Findings

The past generation has seen the integration of America's public schools. Such integration has presented challenges and opportunities not only for the Minority students now enrolled in predominantly White schools, but also for the Minority teachers who find themselves assigned to those same schools. While opening up new horizons for many Minority educators, the purposeful placing of Minorities in majority White schools has also raised the issue of tokenism. The question remains as to whether these Minority teachers are being treated equally with their White counterparts, and whether their assignment to mostly White schools is based upon real ability and genuine need, or whether such assignments are merely reflective of well-meaning social policy gone awry. Many capable Minority teachers find themselves to be victims of the same sort of discrimination that the system of school integration purports to prevent, their abilities and talents wasted in what is little more than a multicultural and multiethnic "show." This paper will discuss the experiences of these Minority teachers, and also attempt an evaluation of their situation with an eye toward providing recommendations regarding the widespread practice of Minority teacher integration in predominantly White schools.

Tokenism: The Role and Experiences of Minority Teachers in Predominantly White Schools

I. The Problem and Its Setting

Introduction

It was only yesterday that segregation reigned supreme across much of the United States. Throughout the South, Black students attended Black schools, and White Students attended White schools. In general, these "separate but equal" institutions were nothing of the kind. Black schools were underfunded and understaffed. Standards and expectations were often significantly lower than those in place in White schools. Blacks taught Blacks and Whites taught Whites, an arrangement that suited a White-controlled society in which the color of a person's skin was the determining factor in his choice of career, his social and economic status, and even his right to express himself politically.

Everything changed, however, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and the calls made for justice and change by such outstanding spokesmen for human rights as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a host of other political and social activists. Jim Crow was abolished, and schools across America were desegregated. Judges all over the country ordered the busing of school-age children to schools that were often far from their homes. The aim was to create schools with student populations that reflected the genuine racial and ethnic make-up of America and of its local communities. From now on, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other Minorities would learn side by side with Whites.

Yet, the aim of an integrated society in which all races and ethnic groups shared equally in the promises of American democracy could not be created simply by the establishment of a multiracial and multicultural student body. The educators themselves would have to come from different backgrounds as well. Only a Minority teacher could be expected to bring a true Minority perspective to the classroom. Only a Minority teacher could serve as an example of the good that education could accomplish for Minorities. The issue then, was one of finding appropriate role models for the new integrated society. Minority instructors would serve as an example to White Students of the good that Minorities could do, and of the positive contributions they could make to society. They would be authority figures who would demonstrate that knowledge and talent were colorblind. And for Minority students, they would serve an additional purpose - that of demonstrating to these youths the fact that a person with the same background as themselves could achieve all that their White brothers and sisters could achieve.

The Problem

This at least, was the theory. All too often unfortunately, these attempts at the integration of faculty and staff were only half-hearted, and involved little more than the sprinkling of a few Black or Hispanic faces among a lily-white cadre of educators. While most acute in districts with little Minority student representation, a related problem afflicted predominantly Minority schools as well. Since integration of students could only take place within the boundaries of actual school districts, the plan to create reasonably diverse student bodies failed in localities that were either largely White, or largely Black or Hispanic. Furthermore, the announcement of a plan to bus Minority children to previously White schools generally served as a clarion call to White parents to move their children out of the public school system altogether. In many large cities - cities that contained large populations of both Minorities and Whites - White students left the public school system in droves. The following table (Fig.1) illustrates the strikingly high numbers of Black and Latino students who continue to attend highly segregated schools, that is, schools in which they - the Minorities - comprise the great majority of the student population:

Percentage of African-American and Latino Students Attending

Predominantly Minority and 90-100% Minority Schools

Predominantly Minority

90-100% Minority

African-American

Latino

1968-69

1972-73

1980-81

1986-87

1991-92

1994-95

Fig 1. (Massey and Denton, 2000)

Note that these numbers remain high despite more than thirty years of busing and similar attempts at integration. And, according to a recent speech by First Lady, Laura Bush, "About 42% of all public schools in the United States have no Minority teachers. The percentage of Minority teachers is expected to shrink to an all-time low of 5%, while 41% of American students will be Minorities." (Bush, 2002)

The problems inherent in these figures are obvious. Many American students, both White and Minority, have little or no exposure to Minority instructors. Such a glaring lack of diversity on the instructional level means a gross lack of multicultural and multiracial exposure for the vast majority of students, and also a glaring absence of appropriate role models, in particular, for African-American and Latino children. Whites too, grow up thinking that only Whites are qualified to hold such positions of trust and authority, positions that require substantial amounts of education and training. Furthermore, for the small number of Minority teachers in America's public schools, the problem is one of isolation coupled with a feeling of purposelessness and frustration.

Significance of Study

Based upon the above evidence regarding the vast disparities between the numbers of Minority students on the one hand, and the numbers of Minority teachers on the other, it is essential to determine if these disparities do indeed give rise to the problems described. Minority instructors were assigned to White schools for the specific purpose of achieving a fully integrated educational environment, one in which both students and faculty would benefit from exposure to persons of different races, and cultural backgrounds. However, the current situation, in which Minority teachers are grossly underrepresented as compared to their White counterparts, gives rise to several concerns. First among these, is the question of whether students, be they White, Black, Latino, or Asian, actually benefit from having a handful of Minority role models? Do the White students obtain any advantage from their exposure to Minority instructors, noting especially that these instructors are very few in number? Do the Minority teachers themselves feel that they are making a positive contribution to the education and to the general social and intellectual development of their students, both Minority and Non-Minority? And last, but certainly not least, do Minority teachers feel that they are genuinely accepted by their White peers? In other words, do they believe themselves to be a legitimate part of the school fabric, and are they perceived as such by White faculty?

Integration slammed black teachers, as well as students, into white schools with white colleagues and administrators who often saw their new colleagues as somehow inferior, and waited for them to fail. Concurrently, black teachers faced white parents who could not conceive of their children being taught by a black person. There was little of the casual exchange in teachers' lounges that often amounts to a teacher training system and source of support to go on after a bad day. Administrators, ordered to make integration succeed, or at least quiet, were reluctant to make constructive criticism and felt unable to engage disciplinary measures. The black community correctly saw black teachers as the sole model for black kids, and sometimes the only understanding allies a black child could find in a fundamentally hostile environment. And in that environment, where in many circles it is still quietly understood by white people that blacks will never measure up, the presence of black teachers serves both as a defense and a constant reminder that someone nearby just might react sharply to racist comments. (Gibson, 1992)

This study will focus on such attitudes as these to determine the extent to which they are true. And, should it be discovered that these attitudes, are indeed generally held, then it shall explore the consequences of these attitudes for Minority faculty and the perceived effects of these attitudes on their respective teaching styles, involvement in faculty and student affairs and activities, and in the their overall feeling of effectiveness in their jobs. Account too will be taken of Minority teachers' feelings of personal satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their positions.

Research Questions random selection of Minority teachers in predominantly White (more than 85%) schools will be supplied with questionnaires containing the following five questions:

How would you rate your overall effectiveness as a teacher based upon your students' performance?

On a scale of 1 to 10-10 being the highest.

Do you find a significant difference in the students' response to you depending upon whether those students are White, or members of a Minority group?

Student responses rated as follows:

Strongly Negative, Somewhat Negative, Neutral, Somewhat Positive, Strongly Positive

Do you find that your presence in the classroom inculcates a greater sense of understanding, and compassion for, Minorities and their concerns on the part of White students in your classroom?

Strongly Disagree, Somewhat Disagree, Neutral, Somewhat Agree, Strongly Disagree

How would you rate your overall level of acceptance by White faculty members and staff in your school?

On a scale of 1 to 10-10 being the highest.

Do you find that your presence on the faculty in your school inculcates a greater sense of understanding, and compassion for, Minorities and their concerns on the part of White faculty members and staff?

Strongly Disagree, Somewhat Disagree, Neutral, Somewhat Agree, Strongly Disagree.

Assumptions of Study

This study will make the assumption that the environments and populations at the schools studied are broadly similar. As well, the backgrounds - educational levels, years teaching, economic level, and upbringing - of the participating teachers will be assumed to be comparable in most respects. Teachers participating in the study will also be deemed to have had similar experiences in regard to instances of racial prejudice and bias directed personally against them, and to have similar conceptions of the attitude of White majority society towards them as members of a Minority group. These incidents and conceptions in the background of, and on the part of the participating teachers will be considered as normative experiences, not deviating in any substantial way from what might be considered to be the "usual" experiences of the "average" Minority individual raised in comparable circumstances. Lastly, the participants in this study will be reckoned as open-minded, and not overly given to subjecting their responses to study questions to preconceived ideas of either what the administrators of the study wish to hear, or of what they, as Minorities, might be expected to feel or expect.

Limitations of Study

Just as this study is enhanced by the open-mindedness of the participants, it is also limited by the natural human inclination to provide expected, or perceived "appropriate" responses to the questions at hand. Also, while every effort will be taken to select candidates who are not themselves overtly prejudiced against their employment as Minorities in a majority White school, and who do not nurture any specifically anti-White sentiments, or harbor any strong, pre-conceived bias against the idea of Minority students and faculty mixing freely with White students, it is recognized that a certain amount of ingrained, subjectivity is unavoidable. All people are creatures of their environment, and the teacher participants in this study are no exception.

Definition of Terms

Minority - a Person of Color, African-American, Latino, or Asian

Majority White School - a school whose student body is at least 85% White

Token - a Minority (see above) teacher who is employed at a Majority White School (see above), the teaching faculty and administration of which school consists of fewer than 5% Minorities.

Student Attitude - the manner in which students react to their teacher; their attitude as reflected in their academic performance, and behavior in the classroom in so far as that behavior conforms with or deviates from generally accepted norms.

Teacher Satisfaction and Acceptance - a measure of the degree to which a Minority Teacher feels that he or she is performing a worthwhile task by teaching at a Majority White school; a measure of the Minority teacher's feeling that he or she is successfully educating and broadening the horizons of his or her students; a measure of the teacher's level of satisfaction with his or her sense of inclusion into the body of Majority White teachers - do they feel a part of the group? Or are they outsiders?

Minority Acceptance - the opening up of White teachers and students to the special and specific problems of their Minority peers; an understanding on the part of Whites of the culture and circumstances of Minorities; an understanding of the attitudes of Minorities towards them, and of their own, perhaps previously unrecognized negative, or biased attitudes toward Minorities.

II. Literature Review

A. Overview

Numerous studies have been done on the problems facing Minority teachers in majority White schools. As already mentioned, many of these teachers have faced the problem of White prejudice or aversion. These attitudes on the part of their White peers have been occasioned both by pre-existent ideas regarding the character and aptitudes of Minorities, as well as by a deep-seated bias against the very idea of a "token." In such cases, the token is immediately taken to be a person of inferior abilities and qualifications; a person who was selected for no other than his or her color or ethnic background. This attitude is similar to that held by many Whites in regard to Affirmative Action programs in general, whether at colleges and universities, private businesses, government agencies, or as in this case, public schools. In addition, many analyses have been done in regard to the change in level of performance achieved by Minority students when taught by Minority teachers, and also of the relative broadening of the horizons of White students, and their increasing levels of acceptance and understanding of their Minority counterparts. Too, many studies have looked at the overall importance of inculcating, in all students, a sense of the importance of multiculturalism, and of living in a multiracial society, especially as not only the United States, but also the world as a whole becomes progressively less and less a place under absolute domination by White males.

B. General Broad-Field Literature Review

As many Whites take issue with the supposed poor qualifications of "token" Minority teachers, it would be of use first to take a look at some of the assumptions upon which these ideas are based. Catherine E. Walsh's, Education Reform and Social Change: Multicultural Voices, Struggles, and Visions, discusses the poor performance by Minority educators on standardized tests. Such low tests scores are frequently taken by Whites as just another sign of Minority incompetence, and are often used to disparage Minority teaching abilities regardless of other more positive assessments such as those gained through actual observation of such Minority teachers, or evaluations of their actual on-the-job performance. Similarly, White stereotypes of Minorities are not greatly altered even by many of the new approaches to including Minority issues - culture and history - in school curricula. As Antoine M. Garibaldi, Wornie L. Reed, and Charles V. Willie explain in, The Education of African-Americans, such forays into Black, or Latino history, for example, are very often treated as curricular sidelines, tangents that have little or nothing to do with the mainstream of American culture and history. The theme of White educators' attitudes toward Minority culture, and toward Minority educators specifically, is continued in, The Handbook of Schooling in Urban America, by Stanley William Rothstein. Mr. Rothstein's point is that the very Minority points-of-view that Latino, African-American, Asian, and other teachers bring to the educational experience are denigrated in favor of accepted majority White norms. On the other side of the equation, one must, of course, examine the attitudes of the students toward these token Minority instructors. The concept of "Cultural Competence" is elaborated by Roxana Ng, Joyce Scane, and Pat Staton in, Anti-Racism, Feminism, and Critical Approaches to Education.

Analyzed are the general lack of any real understanding of the cultures and concerns of ethnic and racial Minorities by Whites, and the corresponding importance of exposing White youths directly to People of Color and to persons of other ethnic backgrounds. The idea is continued in The National Association for Multicultural Education's Seventh Annual Name Conference where the idea of de facto racial separation is discussed at some length. Whites, and Non-Whites and other Minorities, while brought together in the classroom setting as a result of legal attempts at integration, still continue to lead almost entirely separate lives outside of school. Lastly, as a way of rounding things out, Karen B. McLean Donaldson's, Through Students' Eyes: Combating Racism in United States Schools, is a collection of accounts by students of all races, colors, and ethnic backgrounds regarding their own experiences with racism and cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity. The redactions make interesting reading, and provide a fascinating window on the state of race relations in modern-day America.

C. Specific Literature Review

Each of the above texts contains a number of illuminating passages regarding the situations potentially faced by Minority instructors in majority White schools. What follows, is primarily a selection of quotations from these different works, each offering a more detailed perspective on the difficulties facing America's "integrated" schools. Minority teachers may or may not be surprised to discover that many old attitudes still persist, and that many stereotypes still maintain their hold over both White faculty and staff, and also White students. Many of these differences in viewpoint are accentuated by the environment of the majority White school, these schools as such being sorely lacking in the kind of range, and diversity of experiences and opportunities that a more racially and ethnically mixed institution would provide.

As to the obstacles facing Minority teachers, and would-be Minority teachers,

Given that disproportionate numbers of Latino and African-American teachers or teacher candidates tend to do poorly on standardized tests, the net effect of quality control testing of teachers has been to drive Minority teachers out of the teaching pool at the very time more and more students enter the schools from nonmiddle-class, non-White homes. It is thus no surprise that approximately 88% of U.S. teachers are White.

In one illustrative instance of which we are personally familiar, an unusually gifted South Texas Mexican-American kindergarten student teacher was removed from a graduate teaching program because she faired poorly on a timed multiple-choice test, this despite her high undergraduate grade point average and rave reviews from supervisors and parents alike. Experienced educators in her school district stated that they would gladly have hired her but could not under the state's education reform law that required this test.

(Walsh, 1996, p. 14)

Denigrating attitudes such as these toward the quality of Minority teachers have their counterparts in White views on the relative contributions of Minorities to American society. While it is generally perceived as good to include so-called Minority subjects in the curricula - just as it is considered wise to include a small number of Minorities on the faculty - Minority subject matter is generally relegated to an ancillary position in the core curriculum.

When educators add ethnic heroes and fragmented ethnic content to the curriculum, ethnic heroes and content are assumed to be nonintegral parts of the mainstream U.S. experience. Consequently, it is assumed sufficient to add special units and festivals to teach about ethnic groups and their cultures. Particularly in elementary social studies, ethnic content is taught primarily with special lessons and pageants on holidays and birthdays. Blacks often dominate lessons during Black History Week or on Martin Luther King's birthday, but they are largely invisible in the curriculum during the rest of the year. Although blacks and other ethnic Minority groups are now a more integral part of textbooks than they were prior to the 1960s, their presence is neither comprehensive nor sufficiently integrated into the total curriculum.

The infusion of fragmented ethnic content into the curriculum not only reinforces the idea that ethnic Minority groups are not an integral part of U.S. society but also results in the trivialization of ethnic cultures. The study of Mexican-American food or of Native American tepees will not help students develop a sophisticated understanding of Mexican-American culture and of the tremendous cultural diversity among Native Americans. This kind of teaching about ethnic cultures often perpetuates misconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic cultures and leads well-meaning, but misinformed, teachers to believe that they have integrated their curricula with ethnic content and helped their students to understand ethnic groups better.

Superficial teaching about ethnic groups and ethnic cultures may do more harm than good. (Willie, Garibaldi & Reed, 1991, p. 131)

While genuinely attempting to include Minorities and their points-of-view in the school environment, many Whites still succumb to the bias that Minority cultures are not fully equal to the majority White culture. As shown in studies of Latinos and Whites, there is the suggestion that, "...Although many well-intentioned white educators might readily admit that there exist cultural differences between Latino students and white students in how they see themselves, produce knowledge, and think about their world, seldom are the differences between white teachers and Latino teachers given serious consideration." (Rothstein, 1993, p. 196)

Unfortunately, this circumstance is in stark contrast to the theories behind Cultural Competence that take as their "...fundamental assumption that [the] values of cultural pluralism should have a central place in the school curriculum." (Ng, Staton & Scane, 1995, p. 29) Cultural Pluralism and Cultural Competence must be encouraged in the school environment, as substantive multiracial and multiethnic interaction is comparably rare in the world outside the classroom:

As photojournalist Renee Brokaw, wife of NBA's Gary Brokaw, explained: "People who are not racist and are liberals still draw the line at couples. Integration for them means that they go to school together, but God forbid your son and daughter should date. Despite Technicolor and multiculturalism, our lives are still largely segregated - off limits to one another by habit, custom, and choice. (Grant, 1999, p. 306)

Finally, several interesting remarks were made by an African-American teacher on a questionnaire that formed part of a study on multicultural education. The program in question involved various creative methods of teaching White children about children of other races and ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Instructors were encouraged to use audiovisual materials, and even such unusual techniques as dance. The teacher's responses are insightful:

1. Yes/excellent, most children did not realize there were black people out West. The workshop helped to clarify this and the contents was something that can't be told to them enough.